I am about to have our sixth baby. In the three weeks around my due date, one of my businesses has three weddings booked, one of them my sister's, and I am her matron of honor. This is not the first time. Every one of my babies has arrived right next to a wedding or a launch I booked years before that child existed. Five for five.
I used to call that bad luck with a calendar. Now I call it a curriculum, and God kept scheduling the lesson until I finally learned it.
Search "maternity leave for business owners" and you get the same checklist everywhere. Batch your content, hire a virtual assistant, set the autoresponder. All useful, all beside the point. Because stepping away from your business for a birth asks a question no autoresponder can answer for you: is my business fruitful because I produce, or because God provides?
Here is how you find out. If your business genuinely cannot survive six or eight or twelve weeks without you, that is information about what it is built on. A business that collapses the moment you stop producing is running on your cortisol. Your late nights, your adrenaline, your fear of being forgotten, your need to prove something. A woman whose company runs on her cortisol pays for it eventually, in her health, her marriage, her mothering, or all three.
Women ask me constantly how I am a working woman and the primary caregiver of six children without drowning. The honest answer is order, plain and simple. God first, the people He gave me second, the work flowing out of those two instead of competing with them. That is not balance, which is a myth someone invented to sell you a planner. It is a witness. My children get to watch their mother do meaningful work without being consumed by it.
This baby is not mine. I am sitting in a chair right now while eyelashes and kneecaps and a whole nervous system are being formed inside me on a timeline I do not control and could not speed up if my life depended on it. No hustle touches that work. I am not the builder of this child. I am the place she is being built. Once I saw that about the baby, I could not un-see it about the business. I am the steward of a field I did not create, working ground I did not make, waiting on rain I cannot summon.
Maternity leave, it turns out, is just Sabbath with higher stakes. Sabbath was always a test of trust wearing the costume of a day off. Every other time, God made it work. Never smoothly, never in a way I could diagram for you, but the babies came and the events happened and somehow there was room for all of it, the way there was room in a stable in a town that had no rooms left.
Your business is far sturdier than your fear keeps telling you and your baby is not the interruption you are bracing for. The interruption might be the whole point. It might be the exact tool God is using to lift your company off the foundation of your own exhausted striving and set it back down on the One who was always going to hold it.
If you have been exhausted from trying to earn your rest, that is the work I do with women. Going back to the root and healing the place your body first decided it had to earn love and safety and belonging, so your whole system can finally stop bracing.
Let's talk. Book a call with me before I go out on leave 😝
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